Nick Barlow's blog

I never made any great plans for this blog when I started it. Its origin stems from me spending three months travelling around the US in 2002, and then – in those days before I knew of sites like Flickr and its descendants – deciding to get myself a website to show off some of the photographs I took on that trip. While I was sorting out all the photos, I decided that my website should also have one of those blog things, and discovered that I could achieve all that through Blogger. So, I did.

I’m not setting out with any grand plans to change the world, or become the internet’s most respected authority on any subject. It’s just going to be pure unadulterated me, which means it’ll jump around from subject to subject without any warning, will contain the very occasional deep insight into life hidden among thousands of words of meaningless rambling and the occasional rant about something that happens to be annoying me at the time. Plus, of course, there’ll be links to various things I discover on the web, to justify calling it a blog, but they’ll probably all be things that everyone else found days, months or years ago. Whatever I can get away with posting here, really.

As mission statements go, I think I’ve lived up to that over the past ten years, haven’t I?
(The odd thing is that in my memory I started doing the blog and everything else on a Saturday afternoon, but according to the site and the first post, it began on a Thursday)

While the content of my blog remains the same, that’s not how it always looked. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I can see the original layout of the site, which is a lot better than the one I ended up with. I’m not quite sure what possessed me to think the grey-and-green colour scheme was a good idea, but the only reason it’s lasted is because that’s what my Blogger settings were when I finally switched to WordPress in 2005.

It’s been interesting looking back at the posts I wrote back in 2003, and choosing a sample of them. Blogging in the days before Twitter, Facebook, G+ and everything else was very different, still clinging to its roots as link collection and web logging, so many of my posts were just ‘here’s an interesting link’.

Meanwhile, the Tory party was tearing itself apart with battles between right and left. This was the 2003 round of that perennial argument. We never did find out who the ‘two Tory MPs who are about to defect to the Lib Dems’ were, though.

Here’s my first time asking ‘why don’t we have a British version of The Daily Show?’ Ten years on, and still no answer.

Sadly, the website I linked to that explained how James Cameron’s films were all being made to appease his Freemason masters is no longer on the internet. I’d love to have seen how they’d have explained Avatar as a metaphor for the fall of Atlantis and the split between the good and evil masons.

In a post about The West Wing, I appeared to believe that the Republicans couldn’t be captured by the radical right. Back in those days, even the most hardened political obsessives hadn’t heard of Sarah Palin (and most people outside of Illinois would have had no idea who Barack Obama was).

If I’d never started blogging, I’d never have been able to write “The end of the world is predicted by a Hebrew speaking carp in New York.”

I also got to write this little rant when a Tory gimboid accused Liberal Democrats of hating Britain, freedom and god knows what else for daring to oppose Mr Blair’s Iraqi adventure. And even though it was borrowed from elsewhere, I still love that last line.

Here’s a little moment of history – my first ever mention of Colchester local politics comes in this post as part of a local elections liveblog, noting that the Lib Dems have gained 2 seats. If I remember rightly, I think one of them is Lesley Scott-Boutell getting elected in Stanway for the first time and the other is Martin Hunt returning to the Council by winning Christ Church. Ken Jones held Castle for the Liberal Democrats, and four years after that, his seat would be the one I was elected for. On the same night, Iain Coleman became Britain’s first blogger elected as a councillor.

Back in 2003, we were still discussing whether London should bid for the Olympics. It seemed such a distant and unlikely prospect at the time that I don’t recall there being much blogging about it by anybody, mainly because I think we all assumed there was no chance we’d get it. Of course, around the same time I was also discussing the mayoral candidacy of Simon Hughes as though he had a chance of winning.

“The prime role of the web has been to de-isolate nutters and make them think they’re normal.” was one of the key messages I took away from the night when a bunch of bloggers had a meeting in the House of Commons. Though the Orlowski quote at the end of the article may be more relevant in how things have gone since then.

I’m linking back to this post purely because I love the sentence “Verhoeven envisioned Total Recall II: The Minority Report as a whiz-bang, action-packed, “theological-philosophical challenge” to the Calvinist concept of predestination.” They don’t make films like that any more. Not in this universe, anyway.

And with this, my 2003 in blogging came to an end. Tune in tomorrow for a look back to 2004.

This weblog is purely a personal site and unless explicity stated otherwise any opinions stated are purely personal and do not represent those of Colchester Liberal Democrats, Castle Ward Liberal Democrats or Colchester Borough Council.